Studio Smith-Cordell

26/08/2026

A button that isn't a . A modal that traps focus in the wrong place. An error message a screen reader never announces.

None of these shows up in a design review. All of them mean real people can't use your site — and increasingly, they're the kind of thing regulators and lawyers are looking for too.

We've put together our thinking on building accessible websites: why it matters beyond compliance, the legal landscape across the EU, UK and US, and the specific things we watch for on every project (including some headless/JAMstack-specific gotchas).

Have a read: https://smith-cordell.com/blog/accessibility

Accessibility comes up often with clients right now. Partly that's the law catching up with the web. Mostly, though, it's because building for everyone is just better engineering.

25/08/2026

How do you get sub-30ms global load times without giving up a single source of truth for your data?

At studio:sc®, we've been refining a pattern across recent projects: Postgres (via Supabase) stays the source of truth, while Cloudflare KV acts as a globally distributed, read-optimised cache in front of it.

The short version:
→ Admin makes a change → Postgres is updated
→ A secured webhook fires → KV is updated to match
→ Edge requests get served from KV, typically in ~20ms, no matter where in the world they come from
→ If a KV value is ever missing or stale, the app falls back to Postgres directly and quietly repopulates the cache

For time-sensitive content like event listings, we go a step further: individual events are cached permanently and invalidated on write, while the computed "upcoming events" list carries an hourly TTL — so finished events fall off the list even when nothing has been edited.

We wrote up the full pattern, the trade-offs (yes, eventual consistency), and why we chose KV over the alternatives, on our blog: https://smith-cordell.com/blog/postgres-kv-caching

We wanted single-digit-millisecond global load times without giving up a single source of truth for our data. Here's the caching pattern we built on Cloudflare KV and Supabase Postgres to get both.

25/08/2026

Most e-commerce carts make you wait.

Click to add an item, and there's a beat before anything happens. Bump the quantity a few times, and it lags a step behind—or worse, gets confused entirely. Open the same store in two tabs, and neither has any idea what the other is doing.

We made a list of every one of these annoyances, then built a cart for Ungarnished, the London cocktail studio from renowned bartender Angelos Bafas, that doesn't do any of them.

The store is a headless Shopify build using SvelteKit for the frontend and hosted on Cloudflare's edge network. Cart state lives in the browser first—instant on every interaction—then syncs to Shopify in the background. Multiple tabs stay in sync in real time. Quantity changes never lag or race each other. And if something goes wrong (an item sells out after the page has loaded but before the add to cart button is pressed, for instance), the UI rolls back gracefully instead of failing silently.

None of it was strictly necessary to sell some cocktail books and merch. But it's exactly this kind of detail that separates a store that works from one that feels genuinely considered; and it's the standard we hold ourselves to on every headless commerce project.



Full story here:

There's a familiar list of small annoyances in online shopping carts: laggy updates, out-of-sync tabs, quantity buttons that can't keep up. For Ungarnished's new store, we treated that list as a brief.

22/07/2026

Most websites throw away about 25% of the colour your screen can actually show.

That's because almost every image on the web is encoded in sRGB; a colour standard designed in 1996 for CRT monitors. Modern displays (iPhones, Macs, and increasingly everything else) can render a much wider gamut called Display P3. Most sites never touch it.

For Cato, a cocktail bar built entirely around colour, whose current menu is literally called Colour Has Flavour, that gap was worth closing.

So we built a custom image pipeline: SvelteKit + Cloudflare, an R2 bucket for storage, a Hono transformation service, and a component that serves the widest colour gamut each visitor's screen can actually display: sRGB or full Display P3, automatically.

Was it strictly necessary? Probably not. But for a brand whose whole concept is colour-as-sensation, it felt like exactly the kind of detail that shouldn't be optional.

Wrote up the full engineering story here: https://smith-cordell.com/blog/display-p3-image-pipeline